Saturday, October 27, 2012

Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on
Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy.
“The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does
not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a.
But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal
thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose
identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond
space and time.” (GW VI 28)

Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains”
without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of
identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense,
Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but
also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.

As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second
Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a
process of projection, and thus is the first to use“identification” in the psychological sense that became part of
the ordinary language of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Even should it be true
that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the

position of him who
suffers – a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man,

developed but weak in
Civilized man – what would this idea matter to the truth

of what I say, except to
give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the

more energetic as the
Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with

the suffering animal.
Now it is evident that this identification must have been

infinitely
closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning.”

The issue of
personal identity travels to France by way of Locke’s translators and readers –
such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an identifying self is a definite
marker, an intersigne on the way to understanding character under capitalism.
That is, to understanding how character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate
semantic segments to occupy a certain space of symbols and capacities in those
societies that we name by using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition –
modern – as if the modern had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new
framework altogether. Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian
principles of property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification
that, as Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense,
impossible. Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it
working its way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the
seemingly esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis.Just as selfishness can become an acid that
so dissolves the self that one is left with an absolute Berkeleyian idealism,
personal identity inevitably begins to pose the problem of the maker of
persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics of modernity, operating
under the unconscious conviction that they live in the modern, face this
bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place those schemas of
identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though the pre-modern was
some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather than the product of
the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as something generated
within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow and double, an
emergent and undeniable force in the matrix.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

It occurred to me in the hour before cock crow – which in
the 12th arrondissement is around 4 a.m. – that the whole corrupt
train of our present social arrangements can be summed up by the value placed
on “suck” – viz., this sucks, he you or they suck, it sucks. As we all know,
this means that “it” is a disaster, he she or it is a cretin, and that low
quality is the name of this game, if you want to play it. But, as Adam placidly
– or, sometimes, fiercely – sucked on my little finger, giving us a respite from
his desire to try out his new lungs (in top shape! And what volume for a seven
pound five ounce boy!), I realize that this is all wrong, backwards, and
senseless. It sucks should me, it is heaven. Real communism, utopia, the
singularity and nirvana can all be summed up by, it sucks. We long, we little
monkeys, not for nothingness, but for the attaching interface of lips and
tongue, ahold of something. And yet – sucking is not eating or breathing,it is not processing something. Amateurs
think that sucking has a physiological usewholly satisfied by breastfeeding, but an hour or two or three with a
newborn will show these folks the error of their ways – sucking is needed for
breastfeeding, but it is desired in itself, and continues after breastfeeding
palls. Sucking is pure superfluity, pure luxury, pure excess. It is beyond
something, and it disdains nothing.

Of course, any sophisticated 12 year old can tell you it
sucks alludes to something genital and nasty. However, like many of the
malformed views of 12 year olds (cool is cool! you are either in the in crowd
or you are nobody!), this isn’t really sophisticated at all. Alas, the views of
sophisticated 12 year olds rock and rule our world, become our norms, and lead,
as I said above,paragraph one, sentence one, I believe, to the catastrophic
decline of our society. What the 12 year old is in flight from is the surge,
the primitive surge of sucking in which we are all one, a common humanity of
suckers. Having gone through housetraining, school and hierarchy, the fact that
we come from sucking seems too dreamlike, too nightmarish a truth. And yet
there it is. We come from sucking. We all share sucking.

And this lead me – perhaps unwisely, since I have spent much
of the last 48 hours catching very little sleep in a chair designed by the
Marquis de Sade in a hospital room – to my revelation. The society I want to
fight for exists in the shadow of the slogan: I suck, and I want to suck even
more! Or, to expand beyond the trivially egotistic: it sucks, and I have never
heard a more glorious truth! Only a solidarity among suckers will change the
momentum of our decline. I am of the sucker’s party, and proud of it!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.